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The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkSat, 10 Dec 2016 01:41:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432Democrats are the major roadblock to congressional redistricting reform in Marylandhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/03/29/democrats-are-the-major-roadblock-to-congressional-redistricting-reform-in-maryland/
Tue, 29 Mar 2016 14:01:52 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3899124I don’t imagine that many regular readers of this site would be shocked to hear someone complaining about the Democratic Party in Maryland. I could put dozens of issues on the wall and toss a dart at them to find something to criticize. But when the carping is coming from the Washington Post editorial board you really have to sit up and take notice. They’re focusing on the question of gerrymandering congressional district lines this week and it’s the Democrats, not Governor Larry Hogan and the Republicans, who are under the microscope.

WITH TWO weeks remaining in Maryland’s three-month legislative session, Democratic lawmakers in Annapolis have stopped just short of extending a Bronx cheer to Gov. Larry Hogan’s proposal for nonpartisan redistricting reform.

Never mind that the plan from Mr. Hogan, a Republican, is enormously popular with state residents. It foresees a constitutional amendment that would shift control of the redistricting process from self-interested elected lawmakers, who treat it exclusively as an incumbent-protection racket. In its place would be established an independent, nine-member panel that would draw district voting maps without regard to voting history or partisan leanings.

As the Post goes on to point out, the redistricting plan isn’t some wild and woolly scheme which the public is crying out to defeat. Current polling in the state shows that a non-partisan redistricting mechanism enjoys broad support across all demographic and party lines. As usual, the only culprits who are fighting it tooth and claw are the establishment Democrats who have used gerrymandering to great effect in maximizing their control of the political process. This is not a Democrat problem to be sure, since Republicans do the exact same thing in Red states. If anything, it would be even harder to get the GOP to go along with such an idea on a national level since we currently control the state legislatures in a significant majority of places.

That leads us to the big picture problem when it comes to gerrymandering. How on Earth are we supposed to solve an obvious problem on a national level when neither party’s leadership wants it fixed? How do you convince the people making the rules to change the system when it’s worked so heavily to their advantage for so long? This question has made it up to the Supreme Court level a number of times, including one high profile case in Arizona last year which we covered here, but all of the suits they process only nibble at the edges. The Court is never actually asked to rule on the question of gerrymandering in general, but simply to analyze one particular set of bizarre, twisted district maps and decide if they crossed the line in being too obviously unfair with their maps. That’s never going to solve anything.

Unfortunately, even on the state level we’re not going to make much progress if we adopt a “non-partisan” board such as the one proposed in Maryland. Where are you going to find these allegedly non-partisan experts to do the work of drawing district lines without having even a smidgen of political interest or bias? I assume these same paragons of the community will also be 100% immune to corruption and influence from party leaders who would like to whisper in their ears? We have it within our technological capacity already to feed population mapping data into a computer program and spit out standardized districts which are as compact and contiguous as the geography allows and simply let the chips fall where they may. Getting anyone in power to agree to the idea is another question entirely.

]]>3899124Courts strike down 2 North Carolina congressional districts… after voting beginshttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/06/courts-strike-down-2-north-carolina-congressional-districts-after-voting-begins/
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/06/courts-strike-down-2-north-carolina-congressional-districts-after-voting-begins/#commentsSat, 06 Feb 2016 16:31:56 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3892756Things are getting ugly in North Carolina on the election front. A panel of federal judges has tossed out part of the congressional district map which has been under construction for five years now. The boundaries for two of their districts, the 1st and the 12th, have been tossed because Republicans allegedly packed too many black voters into them. If that leaves you scratching your head, we’ll get to the underlying reasons shortly. (Yahoo News)

Federal judges struck down late Friday two majority black congressional districts in North Carolina, saying race was the predominant factor in drawing those lines but state legislators lacked justification in using that practice.

Two of the three judges on the redistricting panel hearing the 2013 lawsuit agreed the size and composition of both the 1st and 12th Districts violated the Constitution’s equal protection provision and must be redrawn.

The judges ordered the General Assembly to come up with new boundaries by Feb. 19, although Republican lawmakers who helped shepherd North Carolina’s congressional map through the legislature in 2011 said a swift appeal was coming. The state could seek a delay at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Because of the rampant use of gerrymandering all over the nation this story might produce a yawn from many readers. We have these cases cropping up all the time, though generally it’s in the first couple of years after each census. This one is causing a lot more consternation though, because the state’s congressional primary elections are coming up next month and absentee ballots are already coming in. The judges gave the state barely two weeks to draw new lines and resubmit them. By that time the mail in ballots will be well on their way, so what do they plan to do about that?

Rev. William Barber, state president of the NAACP, said the federal court ruling validates the group’s argument for the past five years that the voting districts are illegal.

“This unanimous court decision vindicates the record we first brought to the attention of the public – that the state legislature under (Senate President Pro Tem Phil) Berger and (former House Speaker Thom) Tillis had drawn racially biased unconstitutional voting districts,” Barber said in an email to WRAL News. “This is a huge victory in our fight against 21st-century racism and discrimination.”

As I mentioned at the top, there may be a bit of confusion over how building two districts with even more black voters in them is racist, but there’s something to the theory. For their part, the Republicans in charge of the state legislature are saying that they have cut the districts to be fully in line with the Voting Rights Act. They make a good case for at least one of the districts because of the act’s requirement to establish Minority Majority Districts, particularly across the south, ensuring minority voters some territory where minority candidates would stand a better chance of winning. (Somewhere out there, Senator Tim Scott is hearing this and banging his head on his desk.)

So how is that racist? As the theory goes, the GOP supposedly latched on to that requirement as a way to channel as many minority voters into a few districts they knew they would lose anyway, tilting the balance in the opposite direction in neighboring districts. There was a not very subtle explanation of this in the Atlantic a couple of years ago.

But just in time for the redistricting in 1990, some enterprising Republicans began noticing a rather curious fact: The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican. The black, Latino, and Asian representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation was coming at the expense of electing fewer Democrats. The Democrats had been tripped up by a classic Catch-22, as had minority voters: Even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities.

I’ll just skip over my rant about how mandating district construction based on racial divisions goes against the entire idea of building a truly post-racial, colorblind country. You’ve heard it all here before. But the North Carolina case does speak to the larger need to reform this process. If they hit too much of a delay here they’re going to wind up disenfranchising the entire state, not just one subset of it. The idea of “independent panels” making up district maps isn’t much better than what we have now because it would require finding legitimately independent people to get involved with what is, by definition, a politically tainted procedure. We’re at the point now where we should be able to use computer programs to simply divide up states into equal numbers of people with the most compact district shapes possible. Then you just let the chips fall where they may.

Why we’re not already doing this is a mystery to me.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/06/courts-strike-down-2-north-carolina-congressional-districts-after-voting-begins/feed/443892756Could Dan Webster lose his House seat just as he’s running for Speaker?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/10/could-dan-webster-lose-his-house-seat-just-as-hes-running-for-speaker/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/10/could-dan-webster-lose-his-house-seat-just-as-hes-running-for-speaker/#commentsSat, 10 Oct 2015 14:01:54 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3880054There’s some strange happenings afoot in Florida this week and the fallout from a pending court case could impact the careers of several Sunshine State legislators, including Daniel Webster. (R – FL 10) Webster is a favorite among the House Freedom Caucus and a rapidly rising star in the conservative ranks, but he may have some bigger fish to fry if the lines of his home district are suddenly redrawn in a way that will place him in the midst of a heavy Democrat majority. We won’t know for sure until it hits the state supreme court, but the signs are pointing that way. (Yahoo News)

Florida Circuit Judge Terry Lewis on Friday recommended new boundaries for the state’s 27 congressional districts, some of which would make it nearly impossible for U.S. Rep. Dan Webster — one of the hard-line conservatives who pushed John Boehner to resign as speaker and then turned on Boehner’s No. 2, Kevin McCarthy — to win re-election from his current central Florida district.

Lewis’ ruling caps off a three-year legal battle over the state’s political landscape that has led to lawsuits, special sessions and multiple judicial rulings. The Florida Supreme Court will have the final say, but the decision by Lewis is expected to carry weight since he has been involved with the legal battle from the beginning.

In the end Lewis recommended a series of changes that could lead to the ouster of Democratic U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham from her north Florida seat while resurrecting the political career of former Gov. Charlie Crist, who is expected to run for Congress as a Democrat.

This fight has dragged out for several years and similar to other redistricting battles around the country it’s gotten ugly. The funny part for me is that Florida’s map really doesn’t look all that tortured. Here’s the current layout:

For the most part these seem to be some fairly compact and sequential districts. (Okay… 26 looks a little sketchy.) Daniels’ 11th in particular is drawn in a fairly tidy fashion. Compare this map to some of the real eye openers you see in other areas where the maps were probably subjected to tortures which wouldn’t be allowed at Gitmo. Check out the beauty that Democrats drew for Rep. John Sarbanes’ (D) in Maryland 3.

Still, if the state’s supreme court backs up this idea, several legislators will find themselves in a lot of trouble on election day. Webster would have the option of moving next door in the new map to run in a more friendly area, but a decision like that brings with it the double complications of stepping on another Republican’s toes and needing to win over an almost entirely new constituency. Either way, the more of these stories I read, the more I become convinced that we need to shift to some sort of computer generated system which builds compact, contiguous districts based on nothing more than population density. It would require a change in how we view and deal with retail politics on the state level but at least it would take the partisan wrangling out of the equation.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/10/could-dan-webster-lose-his-house-seat-just-as-hes-running-for-speaker/feed/353880054This Missouri college student is the sole vote on whether a sales tax will be increasedhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/04/this-missouri-college-student-is-the-sole-vote-on-whether-a-sales-tax-will-be-increased/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/04/this-missouri-college-student-is-the-sole-vote-on-whether-a-sales-tax-will-be-increased/#commentsFri, 04 Sep 2015 23:21:02 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876061In principle, there’s nothing wrong with gerrymandering. The process of creating congressional districts that are more favorable to the party in charge is to be expected. Gerrymandering is often blamed for the increasing partisan politics in Washington, though that’s probably due to the toxic nature of President Obama’s policies. The Washington Post published three articles that undercut the anti-gerrymandering narrative, with The Fix’s Philip Bump writing, “the idea that we’ve moved away from some golden era of hard-fought contests between cigar-chompin’ politicians simply isn’t true.”

George Washington University’s John Sides wrote in 2013 that gerrymandering gave no advantage to Republicans during the 2010 midterms. He was comparing the 2010 and 2012 results in this context.

“If we assume that nothing else affects House election outcomes but the partisanship of the districts—in other words, if we allow redistricting to have its maximum possible effect—we find that the 2011 redistricting cost Democrats 7 seats in 2012,” he wrote.

Yet, in Missouri, it’s not wonky data crunching that makes gerrymandering interesting. It’s the fact that a single college student has the sole vote in whether a sales tax will be increased (via Columbia Daily Tribune):

A mistake by representatives of the Business Loop 70 Community Improvement District means a sales tax increase the district needs to thrive will require approval by a single University of Missouri student.

On Feb. 28, Jen Henderson, 23, became the sole registered voter living within the community improvement district, or CID, meaning she is the only person who would vote on a half-cent sales tax increase for the district.

The Columbia City Council established the district on a 5-2 vote in April in response to a petition from a group of property owners in the CID boundaries. The “qualified voters” in a CID are capable of levying various taxes or assessments within the boundaries of the district to fund improvement projects. Under state law, decisions to impose sales taxes in a CID are to be made by registered voters living in the district boundaries. If no such registered voters are present, property owners vote.

Many homes surrounding the university-owned property where Henderson resides were not included in the district when it was drawn because district organizers wanted a district free of residents.

In other words, it’s as if the movie “Swing Vote,” starring Kevin Costner, actually came true but on a much, much smaller scale.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/04/this-missouri-college-student-is-the-sole-vote-on-whether-a-sales-tax-will-be-increased/feed/303876061SCOTUS to hear congressional redistricting case on Mondayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/27/scotus-to-hear-congressional-redistricting-case-on-monday/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/27/scotus-to-hear-congressional-redistricting-case-on-monday/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:41:40 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3422593Next week the Supreme Court will hear a case coming out of Arizona which everyone should be paying attention to, since it will have repercussions which affect virtually everyone in the nation. The gerrymandering issue in this country is well known enough that we don’t need to explain it to you here yet again. Some states have taken action to change the old fashioned method of state legislators fighting over lines to serve their own advantage, and in Arizona they turned the process over to a supposedly independent commission. But the legislators in question weren’t wild about the decision of the people and took the case to court. This week the Supremes will hear those arguments.

The high court will hear a case Monday that could give partisan state legislatures sole authority to draw congressional districts, a task voters in several states have transferred to independent commissions.

The case comes from Arizona, where Republican lawmakers want to take back the power to draw the district lines. If the court sides with them after agreeing to hear their appeal, the ruling would affect similar commissions in California and a handful of other states.

Such a ruling “would consign states to the dysfunctionality of a system where politicians choose their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians,” says a brief filed by three national experts on redistricting.

It would be ironic coming from the Supreme Court, which spends much of its time trying to decipher the laws Congress writes. The justices have complained about the political “gerrymandering” process that leads to ever more non-competitive districts, but they have been unable to find a legal standard to limit how partisan the lines can be.

A group in California (where a similar change was put in place) has already filed an amicus brief against the Arizona case, trying to prevent the Justices from flipping everything back to the way it was. They make impassioned pleas about returning the power to the people and taking the nasty politics out of the process, but that’s not what’s going to decide this issue. The Supreme Court is really going to be hearing a case which comes down to semantics.

Arizona is relying on the Constitutional clause which says that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives” will be determined by the state legislature. They further reference an existing law which states that the lines will be drawn “in a manner provided by the law.” Arizona sees this as a no brainer and wants the power given back to them. Opponents are arguing that the language used in the 1700s was different than today, and the dictionaries of the time call the legislature the source of laws and that includes all branches of government and the voters.

The meaning of words change over time, it’s true. Misdemeanor means something very different than it apparently did in colonial days and there are other examples as well. The Justices will likely take a serious look at that claim, but I’m not sure if it will be enough. No matter which way it goes, I don’t know how much difference it makes if we’re only talking about commissions, rather than other, more creative ways of drawing up district maps. I understand that it’s hard to convince some conservatives that gerrymandering is a problem because it works in the favor of the Republicans in the majority of places. For now. But whether you support a change or not, these private commissions are questionable simply because they are composed of people. Who gets to sit on them and how is that determined? How sure are you that the commissioners aren’t partisans themselves?

Unless we can have a new system which relies on computer generated lines which are truly generic, I don’t know that much is going to change. But if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Arizona we can forget about that ever happening either.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/27/scotus-to-hear-congressional-redistricting-case-on-monday/feed/583422593Shock: California’s reformers only made things worsehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/09/it-turns-out-californias-tinkering-with-elections-only-made-polarization-worse/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/09/it-turns-out-californias-tinkering-with-elections-only-made-polarization-worse/#commentsMon, 09 Feb 2015 16:01:33 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3261003They say that the perfect is often the enemy of the good. In the pursuit of perfection, California’s fiddlers and tinkerers possessed with an outsize sense of their historical significance have gone and made an imperfect but functional system worse.

Among the historically illiterate, political partisanship and vitriol in government are not only modern phenomena, but they are also the singular obstacle preventing human progress. Adherents to a bizarre theology, which holds that political polarization today is worse than it has ever been and the people’s representatives in both Congress and state legislatures are uniquely dysfunctional as a result, have undertaken to incrementally remake the nation’s electoral system.

It is this point of view that led some states, including California, to reform the reapportionment process in the hopes of removing the influence legislators have over it. In some circles, merely invoking the term “gerrymandering” serves as a substitute for an argument. Many assert that the decennial process of redistricting is hopelessly corrupt, and it has led to the frustration of the public’s desires. Don’t read too much into the fact that gerrymander reform’s popularity coincides with the decline of the New Deal Democratic coalition.

It was not long after California reformed the redistricting process by creating a supposedly impartial independent commission to oversee it that observers learned that reapportionment was still subject to manipulation.

“The citizens’ commission had pledged to create districts based on testimony from the communities themselves, not from parties or statewide political players. To get around that, Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party’s interests,” read a 2011 ProPublica report. “When they appeared before the commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party. One woman who purported to represent the Asian community of the San Gabriel Valley was actually a lobbyist who grew up in rural Idaho, and lives in Sacramento.”

Similarly, the desire to fix that which was never broken has resulted in a unique electoral reform in California: A top-two primary system in which the two candidates who receive the most votes, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the general election.

“Absent the need to appease the most puritanical elements of the major parties, the thinking went, candidates would broaden their appeal to the many voters in the middle,” The Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Barabak summarized. “Voila! A more harmonious, pragmatic and productive Legislature.”

Well, something funny happened on the way to utopia.

“New academic research, published Sunday by the California Journal of Politics & Policy, found that voters were just as apt to support candidates representing the same partisan poles as they were before the election rules changed — that is, if they even bothered voting,” the report continued.

According to research published by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, the new rules have not resulted in a dramatic increase in crossover voters. Fewer than 6 percent of Democrats and less than 8 percent of Republicans reportedly supported a candidate from the opposing party in the 2012 state Assembly races. Those partisans who were shut out of the general election when two Democrats or two Republicans advanced to the general election tended just to stay home on Election Day. The hapless theorists who suggested that a top-two primary system would draw in the disinterested voter were dismayed to learn that this voter continues to cling stubbornly to his disinterest. The 2014 primary in California only saw a quarter of the state’s registered voters turn out, the lowest in the state’s history.

“Proponents of the ballot measure didn’t necessarily mislead people,” Barabak concludes. “But they seem to have invested more hope than merited in the virtues of their transformative surgery.”

While this reporter correctly chides the reformers for their undue faith in their own ability to remake the American electoral system, he diagnoses the problem incorrectly. Barabak avers that this reform must “overcome” both “widespread ignorance” and “apathy among California voters” in order to be successful. This self-flattering expression of fealty to an erroneous shibboleth is precisely what gave birth to this misguided reform in the first place. Barabak had just concluded observing that voters were less apathetic in a pre-reform era and that their supposed “ignorance,” exemplified apparently in their desire to support candidates occupying the fringes of political thought, was unchanged as a result of this reform. If anything, this phenomenon was exacerbated as candidates vying for seats in partisan districts shunned unnecessary moderation in order to appeal to a smaller, more ideologically homogenous electorate.

In short, the result of California’s reforms was the precise opposite of their desired effect.

What Americans need today more than elaborate reforms concocted by academicians possessed of an absurd and meritless self-regard are more policy makers with a sense of humility and posterity. Too often, assured of their own value, the reformers overpromise and under deliver. It is with disturbing regularity that the reformer’s dream turns into a nightmare for those subjected to their whims.